


Fill The Tank (Let's Run Away)

by Missy



Category: Carrie (1976), Carrie - All Media Types, Carrie - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Assylum, Bonding, Crueltide, Developing Relationship, Escape, F/F, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Mental Institutions, Pre-Slash, Yuletide, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-08 22:41:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5515967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/pseuds/Missy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sue plays the popularity game to spring herself from her asylum life.  The new girl - with her penchant for silence and setting fires - might just be her ticket to freedom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fill The Tank (Let's Run Away)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wonderwanda](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wonderwanda/gifts).



> I tagged this for triggers as thoroughly as possible - if I missed any please let me know! Happy holidays, wonderwanda - your AU idea intrigued me thoroughly.

It smelled like cotton candy and old mothballs in the common room. Sue remembered those distinct scents from her very short childhood; old memories of childhood trips to her grandmothers flooded back, unbidden, when she sat there and worked with calm conviction on her sampler. The more she completed the closer she strode to normalcy, and the closer she got to normalcy the closer she would get to freedom. She believed her doctors when they told her that; that if she could just stop pulling her hair and biting through the thin skin of her bottom lip she’d finally be considered well and whole enough to be released.

The order of events that had led Sue to Arkham seemed to pass by in a wink to her; the shouting, the accusations, and finally the butcher knife that pierced her father’s chest. She’d done it as an act of self-defense, of course; he was the one who had told her that she was imagining her mother, conjuring her long-dead form and face everywhere she went. He had to be silenced, just so she could hear her voice better…

…But nobody could know about that. Sue concentrated on being normal and developing relationships. The more normal she seemed, the more likely she was to be recommend for release, and the more quickly she could find her mother and they could start over again.

Until then, she vowed, she would be the most popular girl in Ward G.

***

The blonde girl was incredibly withdrawn when Sue met her. She sat in the corner, her head down, her eyes shut tight, reading intently or staring into space. Sue finally decided to approach her one morning after exercises; they were all in the common room together and the blonde girl was busy staring at a book, not flipping the page but just drowning herself in the ink therein, while the others continued to watch TV beside her.

“Hi.” 

The girl cringed back from Sue’s form. “Hello,” she said to her knees.

“My name is Sue,” she said. “Sue Snell – what’s yours?”

“Why do you want to know? The girl’s cornflower blue eyes darted about in her skull, as if she were waiting for a fatal blow.

“No reason,” Sue said. “I just thought that maybe we could talk.”

“To me?” Carrie laughed bitterly. “Nobody’s ever wanted to talk to me. I’m a freak. People hate me before they even meet me.”

“Why would anybody hate you?” she wondered. “You look harmless enough to me.”

“You don’t really know me,” the girl said. “Nobody does. Not even God.” 

Sue sat back and frowned. A religious nut, eh? She’d seen women like that before, and had learned how to let them handle them easily. “For all you know,” she said, “God might have intended to bring us together.”

The girl said nothing. 

“Would you like to tell me your name?” Sue asked.

“Carrie,” the girl told her knees. “Carrie White.”

Sue smiled. At least the girl was emerging from her shell. Things might just get interesting around here after all.

***

During lunch the following day, she sent over a note to Carrie. “Would you like to hang out during arts and crafts? Check yes or no.”

The note came back with “no” crossed out in red pen. Hmm. She was going to be harder to get close to than she though.

After the meal, when they were locked in the common room with their baskets and wallets, Sue drifted toward Carrie and sat down carefully. “I really mean what I said,” she said. “I’d like to be friends.” Maybe it really was because she wanted to be the most popular person in the ward – maybe she thought the young blonde would be eaten alive by the system, maybe she wanted the power of knowing she’d helped out someone less fortunate than her; either way Sue wanted desperately for the girl to actually notice her. 

“Do you know what happened to the last person who tried to be my friend?” Carrie asked. She raised an eyebrow. “They died. In a fire.”

The words broke through Sue’s veneer of politeness. She remembered – thought she could recall, in fact – the blaze in the next town over because it was all over the news and all anyone could talk about for weeks. Thick sheets of black smoke rolled over the asylum for days afterward, and Sue could remember hearing whispers that the person accused of the arson was right there living in the asylum. The rumors were true - here stood the one that had killed almost the entire student body of her high school in a single blaze of angry glory. And half the town. Couldn't forget that. 

Some part of Susan was impressed, and the rest of her knew total fear. “Did you do it?” she asked.

And all at once Carrie’s eyes welled up, and her little body curled into a ball and she let out a terrible wail. “I didn’t MEAN to,” she cried. “They were so cruel to me, they wouldn’t stop – they just wouldn’t – so I…I…Tommy didn’t deserve that! He was the only one who…”

Sue’s eyes went wide. The door handle behind Carrie had begun rattling ominously. “What the hell are you doing?”

The question just made the rattling more violent. Before’s Sue’s shocked eyes the entire implement seemed to fly to bits.

Around them alarms sounded, attendants grabbing them and tying them back. Sue had been through this drill before but this time it felt a bit extreme, a bit too frightening and violent. She closed her eyes and endured.

***

She wasn't allowed to see Carrie for a full year after ‘the incident’ as they so lovingly called it. It took a lot of finagling for Sue to even get an inch closer to the girl, which finally happened at the asylum's Christmas party.

Carrie sang, to her amazement, pretty well. How odd for such a divine gift to have been given to such a strange, eerie girl? Sue still had her ear to the gossip mines – she knew that this time Carrie’s the golden child, the one responding oh-so-well to treatment, and Sue’s the one who had begun resisting the system, placed on new medication, feeling like a ghost in her own skin.

She stuffed a note under the girl’s tray. ‘See me after lunch’. She didn’t expect her to show, but she did, wearing her little red sweater, her long hair tied back.

“I don’t like what we are when we’re together,” Carrie confessed suddenly. “I think the sisters are right, and we shouldn't be near each other.

Sue shook her head. “We need each other! With my brains and your powers we could rule the whole wide world.” Carrie gasped. “Did you think I didn’t know something was going on when you made a whole door handle explode with your feelings?”

She rested a hand on Carrie’s upper arm. “Come on. Haven’t you had fun once your whole life?”

“Mama used to say my gift was a sin. Eve was weak. I’m like that because Eve was weak.”

“Carrie, your mom’s a crispy critter. I’m alive. I’m here. What’s it gonna be?”

***

She couldn't talk Carrie into leaving her cross behind, her Bible, but she had to admit that she looks cute sitting in the front seat of the Convertible Sue hotwired after Carrie short-circuited the fence line that kept them all hemmed in. The adults slept while the two of them escaped , their myopic eyes wired shut now that Carrie had blasted the cameras to static.

Sue closed her eyes and let the wind blow through her hair. It would be hours before they were discovered, by then they’d be beyond the Mexican border, and from there they could go anywhere – Canada, Europe, Spain…

“Turn the radio up,” Sue said. “I feel like dancing.”

“You’re driving.”

“I can do both.”

And the music blew them away, over the border, propelled on gasoline and hope and their own unbound emotions.


End file.
